Sylvia Snowden: Painting Humanity
The Hepworth Wakefield
16 March - 3 November 2024
Elueeta Johnson, 1978
© Sylvia Snowden
Courtesy Edel Assanti and Franklin Parrasch Gallery
Photo by Andy Keate
Beverly Johnson, 1978
© Sylvia Snowden
Courtesy Edel Assanti and Franklin Parrasch Gallery
Photo by Andy Keate
Steven Thornhill, 1979
© Sylvia Snowden
Courtesy Edel Assanti and Franklin Parrasch Gallery
Photo by Andy Keate
Julia Shepherd, 1980
© Sylvia Snowden
Courtesy Edel Assanti and Franklin Parrasch Gallery
Photo by Andy Keate
The Hepworth Wakefield presents the first public gallery exhibition in Europe of work by African-American painter Sylvia Snowden. The exhibition presents a selection of paintings from a career that spans six decades.
Painting Humanity includes seven large acrylic and oil pastel works painted in the late 1970s and 1980s. Despite being named after people that Sylvia Snowden knew from her neighbourhood, these works are not conventional portraits and her figures are not intended to be physically recognisable as the individuals for whom they are named. Rather, Sylvia Snowden’s paintings, typically of lone figures with vibrant and highly expressive combinations of colour, convey the psychological states of her particular subjects – their triumphs, torments, joys and pains.
Sylvia Snowden’s interest in expressing fundamental human qualities can also be seen in three more recent paintings from 1999 and 2001. The movement and dynamism in these paintings reveal how passionate she is about paint, and still very much excited by its potential. Her works are a strident depiction of empathy, compassion and understanding.
Photo by Ellie Smith
The Hepworth Wakefield, 15 March 2024
Photo by Nick Singleton
Sylvia Snowden was born in 1942 in North Carolina and raised in Louisiana before moving to Washington DC at the age of 13. Sylvia Snowden took undergraduate and postgraduate studies in fine art at Howard University between 1960 and 1965. Sylvia Snowden’s artistic training took place during a pivotal moment in Black American political history and the civil rights struggle, and she became deeply invested in these issues. Sylvia Snowden describes her powerful figurative paintings as ‘portraits of humanity’.
Laura Smith, Director of Collection & Exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield, said: ‘We are delighted to be staging Snowden’s first solo exhibition in a European public gallery. The project will introduce many more people to Snowden’s large and expressive paintings of lone, misshapen bodies depicted in vibrant clashes of colour and paint so thick it is almost sculptural. Snowden’s are not traditional portraits, rather an effort to convey human psychological states. We believe our audiences will enjoy the emotional intensity of encountering Snowden’s work.’
THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD
Gallery Walk, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF1 5AW
